Intersectionality and ME

I recently read a blog on intersectionality titled Explaining white privilege to a broke white person. The author eloquently explained how we may have abilities and privileges that we don’t consciously realize. I paralleled this author’s own tale with that of my mother who knew of the concept, but not its name; all the while being a silent part and learning from its consequences.

As an girl she grew up in a time when immigrant Hispanics experienced much bullying at the hands of Hispanics born in the US. Lucky for her, my grandparents immigrated when she was very young, and my grandfather being an American Citizen, DNS(Department of Naturalisation Service) decided to naturalize her when the family emigrated. No one at school or outside of her home knew her secret, she was a wet back, a pocha, a mojada; all that mattered was she wasn’t born on American Soil.

She watched as her friends and other schoolmates belittled and snubbed any student not born on American soil while flaunting their perceived superiority. If you spoke up against the behavior or defended the targets, yours was a swift social death. She was never gifted in scholastics and after graduation, she never returned to school again. Her experiences however, became lessons for her sons and when I was a boy she passed many of them on to me.

I distinctly remember sitting in her lap as a child learning to read together as she corrected my pronunciation. I recall being frustrated at times with myself for not making the sounds properly but wondering it’s importance. Finally one day, I asked, “How come I have to do this, why is it important?”

My mom replied “You’re brown, nothing in the world will change that. You have to be able to speak properly and without an accent because this world is controlled by rich, white-men. If your going to succeed, you need to sound like them, behave like them, and most of all think like them. However, you’re also Mexican, so you need to speak Spanish as well as recognize and embrace that heritage. The Mexicans will never see you as one of them, nor the whites, but that doesn’t matter because they should like Mario.”

I have been told on many occasions that people don’t see me as Mexican or Hispanic, they see me as me. Ironically those are my initials and my motto; I’m just ME. I succeed personally and professionally because I strive to be the best I can be while remembering where and what I’ve come from.